WASHINGTON — An internal FEMA report that calls for urgent reform after Hurricane Katrina outlines old failures the disaster response agency was warned about five months before the storm struck.

A Feb. 13 report assessing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the storm concludes FEMA suffered from confusing leadership roles, outdated or inadequate response plans and inexperienced or undertrained staff during Katrina. It also details problems in tracking supplies to disaster sites.

All of those findings were highlighted in a March 2005 consultant’s analysis, titled “A Vision for the Future,” on how to revamp FEMA before the next disaster hits.

“For years FEMA has approached disasters almost timidly,” the agency’s post-Katrina report found. “FEMA should be attacking with sledgehammers, not fly swatters. Specific changes in logistics need immediate attention.”

FEMA’s internal review is the latest to surface in a series of studies about the government’s sluggish response to Katrina, and how to fix it before the 2006 hurricane season starts on June 1. Katrina struck last Aug. 29.

Senate investigators are wrapping up their own inquiry of the Katrina response, following findings by the House and the White House that concluded FEMA failed to learn from earlier disasters.

FEMA acting director R. David Paulison said the agency is looking carefully at all post-Katrina reports, and he described them as “helpful in rebuilding FEMA.”

But Paulison, a former Miami-Dade County fire chief in Florida, acknowledged the government is often slow to revamp itself, comparing the recommendations made after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to Katrina more than a decade later.

“You could have taken Andrew’ out and put Katrina’ in,” Paulison said in a brief interview last week.

He added: “FEMA was a four-letter word when I was a fire chief during Hurricane Andrew, and that’s why I’m determined to make (changes) happen.”

Many reforms following disasters are never enacted because of financial costs and power struggles, said University of Pennsylvania scholar Donald F. Kettl, co-author of “On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.”

“The big crises like Sept. 11 and Katrina challenge us and punish us for failing to adapt,” said Kettl, a political science professor. “But these reports call for really dramatic, radical change in ways that disrupt the patterns of political power and standard operating procedure. So it’s a lot easier to let the day-to-day pressures rule instead of confronting the issues that we know we have to deal with.”

Former FEMA director Michael Brown said the two documents, taken together, raise concerns that few of the lessons learned from Katrina will be heeded. Brown, who left the agency under fire days after Katrina hit, is a top critic of the Homeland Security Department, FEMA’s parent agency.

“They are fighting an uphill battle,” Brown said Monday. “They wouldn’t give me the money and resources to do it.”

The new FEMA report was posted on the agency’s Web site earlier this year. The agency pulled it from the site after a reporter’s inquiry. The 2005 analysis by the Mitre Corp., obtained by The Associated Press, examined FEMA’s performance during the 2004 Florida hurricanes.

Both reports describe FEMA’s blunders in trying to communicate and coordinate with on-site disaster responders, and get much-needed supplies like food, water and ice to victims.

Mitre, in early 2005, found FEMA was incapable of getting a clear picture of the disaster as it unfolded because it did not have a system capable of sharing information from the ground-up. It also concluded that FEMA could not track supplies as they were being distributed.

One unnamed employee interviewed for the Mitre report worried about holes in the tracking system, noting: “White House is asking, ‘Where are the water trucks?’ I didn’t know… We don’t have confidence that the trucks have checked in, arrived at the destination. We have to rely on third parties to tell us they have arrived.”

The February report noted that responders in New Orleans were unable to communicate easily and quickly with the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge because of inadequate phone and data systems. It also said FEMA’s tracking system “was of little use.”

“Unfortunately, logistics personnel had a muddled picture,” the report found.

Homeland Security has pledged to develop response systems before the next hurricane season begins. They include better tracking of supplies, registering victims, approving debris removal contracts and creating disaster teams to give the agency a real-time picture of unfolding emergencies.

“There are a lot of things we can do between now and hurricane season,” Paulison said. “But there’s stuff that’s just going to take a couple of years to get in place.”